UB startup POP BIO partners with global pharma companies

By CORY NEALON

“Essentially, it can make existing vaccines’ responses more powerful and longer-lasting, and open the door to creating vaccines for diseases that so far have evaded a vaccination.”

Jonathan Lovell, assistant professor

Department of Biomedical Engineering

UB spinoff POP Biotechnologies (POP BIO) is ending the year on a
high note.

The Buffalo-based, biopharmaceutical startup recently inked
research agreements with two international pharmaceutical
companies, signed a manufacturing contract with a regional drug
development firm and moved into new digs at the UB Technology
Incubator at Baird Research Park.

The company has developed a vaccine adjuvant called SNAP, an
abbreviation for Spontaneous Nanoliposome-Antigen Particleization.
Adjuvants are immunological agents, often used to enhance the
efficacy of vaccines and drug treatments.

The technology is the basis for the research with the
international pharmaceutical companies

“Essentially, it can make existing vaccines’
responses more powerful and longer-lasting, and open the door to
creating vaccines for diseases that so far have evaded a
vaccination,” says UB researcher Jonathan Lovell, whose lab
developed the technology that POP BIO is advancing.

Lovell is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical
Engineering, a joint program of the School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences and the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical
Sciences.

“If successful, our collaboration with our international
partners will produce vaccines for life-threatening diseases which
currently have no vaccine,” says Jonathan Smyth, POP
BIO’s chief administrative officer and a graduate of the UB
School of Law. “Additionally, this work will validate our
adjuvant technology in pre-clinical studies and open an avenue for
clinical co-development deals.”

Out of respect for client confidentiality, POP BIO is not
disclosing the names of the three companies it’s working
with, nor the disease targets.

POP BIO also is working on commercializing a light-based
chemotherapy treatment — also developed in Lovell’s lab
— that kills cancer cells while causing only limited harm to
the tissue around them.

The company won the 2015 Henry A. Panasci Jr. Technology
Entrepreneurship Competition, which was created by the UB School of
Management and UB’s economic development offices. It also
attracted the interest of America Online co-founder Steve Case, who
along with local investors awarded POP BIO $100,000 in 2015 during
Case’s Rise of the Rest business plan contest.

“It’s challenging to start a new life sciences
company. But with the support of local startup programs like
Panasci, UB Incubators and Launch NY, companies like POP BIO are
finding success in Buffalo,” Smyth says.

In addition to Lovell and Smyth, Kevin Carter, a PhD student in
Lovell’s lab, is a co-founder of the company.